Wednesday, 8 February 2017

I put that gasper down

I
have given up smoking.

I feel rather stupidly embarrassed that I should have to write that sentence, because
what the buggery bollocks was I doing, smoking in the first place?

I
grew up in the Lambourn valley in the seventies and everybody smoked except for
my dad, who never fancied it. The trainers used to smoke at first lot, sitting
on their hacks, and the owners smoked and the vets smoked and the farriers
smoked and the jockeys smoked and the lads smoked. Away from real life, away
from the downs with the larks on the wing, in all the old black and white films
I loved, every luminous star smoked. Humphry Bogart smoked and Lauren Bacall
smoked and in order to show they were really sexy leading men used to light two
cigarettes and hand one to Bette Davies. (In her pre-Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane? days.)

But
then there were the eighties and nineties and people learnt about health and
death and mortality figures. So then I had no excuse. I couldn’t simply dream
of Lauren Bacall any more. It was all fag ash Lil and get your leg amputated.

I
gave up a couple of times and then started again. It really was my drug. How I
loved my addiction, my jailer, the brute on my back. I loved the white and gold
Marlboro packets and the rustle of the silver paper in the top and the first
puff on a new stick. I loved buying fags by the yard, as if stocking up on some unimaginable luxury; staring happily at the rows of shiny packs, pushing into the box marked Denial the fact that I might as well take out a stack of fivers and burn them on a bonfire.

I
ruthlessly ignored the slight rasp in my throat and the faint sense of burning
in the mouth. (There is a point where your mouth feels permanently singed, but
you, being an idiot, decide that’s actually quite pleasurable. That is how far
in the black hole you are.) I can’t give up these beautiful things because they
are my friends and they’ve been with me since I was a teenager when my family was
in turmoil and I didn’t have anywhere to live and I changed houses like they
were buses and my mum was in tears all the time. But I had my crafty, secret
fags and my secret smoking buddies and that sort of made everything all right.

Actually,
I suddenly realise this is not what I mean to write at all. The ancient history
is ancient, and quite dull. I meant to say that I have been coiled in cognitive
dissonance for the last couple of years: thinking I loved something that I knew
was going to kill me. That’s a sodding big stone in the mental shoe. I’m
sometimes a bit sniffy about people in cognitive dissonance, but now I see
perhaps that was Freudian projection, because I was dissonancing all over the
damn shop. There is no justification for something that will do the human body
so much ill, but the magical mind, the addicted mind, the scared mind will make
up such stories.

I
even believed that I would be the freak who would get away with it. Everyone
had a Great-Aunt Nellie who lived till ninety and was on sixty Woodbines a day
and still cracking on. I would be Great-Aunt Nellie.

In
the end, it had to stop. I was so embarrassed that I was fifty and still
smoking that I did not want to tell anyone. I’ll just quietly stop and then
everyone will forget I was so silly, I thought.

In
my evil, arcane mind a voice was saying: don’t tell anyone because you’ll give
in after a week and if you haven’t told a soul, nobody will know you have
failed.

Now
I stare that voice in its maniacal, lizard brain face and say: fuck off. I want to ride until I am
eighty and I don’t want my leg cut off and I don’t want to stop and catch my
breath halfway up the stairs. I don’t want to make my nieces cry because I died
ten years before I needed to. I want to have those ten years so I can read all
the books and write all the books. And if I tell people then I have witnesses.
Not witnesses to scold or suggest or offer advice, I don’t want them, but
witnesses to witness. Everybody needs a witness. If I fail, I fail, and I’ll
tell you about that too.

So,
I slink out of the shadows, looking about like a wary night creature, wondering
if people will laugh and point. It’s been three days now and I can’t tell you
what it’s like. It’s nothing like before. Those two efforts were a piece of
piss. This is like being kicked all over by a furious Shetland pony or being
trapped under a heavy piece of furniture. Everything hurts. I don’t really even
want a cigarette because my whole body has gone into spasm and all I can think
of is the physical pain. I drink pints and pints of water and make acres of
green soup. I clamber out of bed, walk the dogs, see to the horses, and then
collapse back under the blankets. I put the Rachel Maddow Show on like a
bedtime story, so I drift in and out of feverish sleep with the latest Trump
iniquity threading through my dreams.

It
is exactly like having a very heavy flu. Is this, I wonder, astonished, what I
have done to my body?

The
first two days are all sleeping and hydrating. I so, so wish I could tell you I
simply made the decision, had a nice cup of ginger tea, and got on with it. I
can’t stand those people who make a five act opera of everything. But I’m
afraid this was quite dramatic. I could not function on any meaningful level,
and I was embarrassed about that, too.

Then
I ran into a dear friend in the chemist. I had gone for Panadol, for the pain.
She looked absurdly beautiful and healthy. It was a dour, dull day and she
shone into it like a radiant sunbeam. ‘I’ve given up smoking,’ I blurted out.
She was my first witness. She looked perfectly delighted and not judgy at all.
I went home and put some more Trumpian lunacy on the computer and went back to
my strange, fractured sleep.

Today,
I feel more like a human. I went up to HorseBack to do some work and meet some
new people and some old people. I wondered if I looked or sounded slightly
peculiar, but I busked it. Luckily I had one of those mad trapper’s hats to
hide under, the kind I always think that countrywomen in Canada must wear, with
the fur and the flaps.

I
go home and have a sudden yearning for my old friends. Just one, I think,
couldn’t do any harm. Surely? I eat more green soup instead.

This
is a bit of a bastard for me because all my life I’ve believed in willpower. A
barrister once said to me: ‘You can’t make things happen simply through an act
of will.’ I thought: that’s all you know, arguing things you don’t believe for
money. (This was pure defiance, since really I have a vast respect for
barristers.) The awful thing is that I always did think that will would be
enough. I was not naturally terribly clever, but I swotted away with so much
furious determination that I passed all the exams. I’m not naturally a
brilliant rider, but I went to Mrs Payne and Anthea the Dressage Coach and
gritted my teeth and kicked on and won more prizes than I probably should have.
It was will that drove me on, in school and on ponies; will, and a sort of cussed refusal to be beaten. If I
did not have will, then I had nothing.

But
that smug old advocate was right: will alone is not enough. Nicotine is a
sneaky bastard and smoking is so psychologically convoluted that just saying no
doesn’t quite cut it. How I wish it did. It makes me cross that it doesn’t.

I
have given up smoking. I’ve told you now. You are my witnesses. I feel like
crap and I feel relieved and I feel livid and I feel liberated and I feel
melancholy and I feel bright as new paint and I feel despairing and I feel
fired with hope. All at the same time. It’s bloody tiring but I think it is
worth it.

17 comments:

Best of luck to you. I've been a smoker all my life also, 3 years ago I moved to vaping. I know I should give that up too, but what a difference. My clothes don't smell, I don't smell (I hope) & smoking doesn't rule my life anymore. I hated when I had to leave the barn & go for a walk just for that smoke! I just wish I could get my husband to stop so the house & the cats don't smell anymore.We don't judge, if you end up taking a small step backwards we're here to help you make a large leap forward! Hope our support helps :)

Oh god... Makes me go into a cold sweat, just thinking about it. Have smoked forever, too. Courage, Tania. Thank you for the laugh about the mad trapper hat, for those who identify closely as being rural Canadian princesses.

Oh well done you! Really rather oddly it is 25 years today since I gave up after we had had friends for dinner and they said they would leave a bottle of champagne on my doorstep if I gave up for a week. A week later I said hold the champagne as I am still feeling a bit wobbly - we'll wait a month as I still felt as if I had lost a good friend that I wasn't quite ready to lose. Well, as I said, that was 25 years ago - you need a witness and an encourager to keep going. Lynne

Good luck. Gave up smoking and drinking 4 years ago at New Year (not as bad as it sounds, as I always found one led to an excess of the other). Loved getting rid of the tyranny of the fag packet - just think of the money!

Goodness me, that's amazing. I gave up almost ten years ago - I used patches and knitting - had to have something to do with my hands so I knitted a bloody awful cushion. I always missed it dreadfully, though managed not to restart, then finally about a year ago I got an e-cigarette, I love it. I know the jury is out on them, but I enjoy it and the ability to pick it up for a quick vape and there being no smell or ash or hassle is brilliant. Good luck and treat yourself kindly, Non-judgy mcNon-judgyson.x

If you tell yourself you are merely stopping, not giving up, that can be quite helpful. It's a silly trick, but sometimes it works. Also, try to imagine how happy you will feel in the morning when you wake up and your lungs are clear. Put all the money you don't spend on cigarettes in a box and spend it on something divine, like a jewel. Wear it every day and whenever you feel like having a cigarette, look at the jewel and think: this is my non-smoking me jewel.

I gave up about 17 years ago using nicotine gum to help me. I am now addicted to nicotine gum and chew constantly 17 years on! I am too scared to ever have a cigarette as it was so hard to quit the habit. If you can do it without substitutes you will be freer!

Oh, how wonderful that you are taking this step! I was amazed to realize over the past year or so how much I have been using food as an emotional crutch. It's mind-boggling, isn't it, what we don't really know about ourselves until it becomes so clear it's embarrassing? Best of luck to you, and as someone above said, don't give up if you backslide. Just keep going. That's what I'm doing with the eating thing, anyway. Every day is a new chance to begin again.

I'm late to the celebration of your liberation from cigarettes but wanted to say that almost two decades on, every time I remember that I used to smoke, I feel an amazing surge of gratitude and joy that I was able to give up that habit. At one time I honestly believed I would never stop craving smokes, stop inhaling deeply when someone lit up nearby. I wish I could give you an exact timeframe but somewhere in the first decade of being smoke free I realized the smell was repugnant. I could remember only the stench of filled ashtrays, that burn in my throat, and my junkie-like dependence that filled me with worry I might run out. The joy of leaving cigarettes behind never fades. Keep going. Keep trying. Never give up.

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